redahs

Because allowing new public legal tender to be created on security of fictitious capital such as speculative land values and deposits of credit created by other banks is accounting fraud, transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, creates speculative bubbles in financial asset markets, promotes disinvestment in the real economy, decreases demand for labor, inflates the price of land relative to wages for unsupervised labor, and worsens inequality.

The traditional american school of thought on money is that

1) the optimal supply of money is externally determined by the needs of commerce for liquidity,

2) new money can be created to meet the needs of commerce through public loans secured by real property pledged as collateral without any fixed artificial limits on supply

3) money may be circulated with an expiration date to discourage long term hoarding,

4) general governments should retain the ability to suppress the private issuance of bank notes and regain public control of the circulating medium of exchange in order to emit unsecured notes to pay for defensive war expenditures in the event that it cannot obtain loans from private banks and it is existentially necessary to do so

So some of the ideals espoused by blockchain activists may clash a bit with that.

In order for money to be both real and useful it should be secured by unencumbered interest in durable real property.

The simplest way to circulate commercial paper for daily transactions is the Benjamin Franklin paper money system which involves appointing public loan officers throughout a nation to issue equity loans to anyone in possession of unencumbered interest in durable real property which they are willing to pledge as collateral which the public can auction in the event of non-payment.

This way money is placed in circulation so that the interest paid for the first use of legal tender is publicly collected and immediately spent back into the economy and so that the total quantity of money expands dynamically in proportion to the aggregate quantity of physical durable capital.

Which is rational. The annual product of lunar soil is zero. Extending the margin of production to the moon will lower wages and increase poverty. The only way to get the general public behind the idea of settling other planets is through remote terraforming. If there were robots, domes, mirrors, and synthetic organisms put there first to provide free soil, air, and water to settlers, then the annual product of lunar soil be above zero, and off-planet workers could actually receive wages.

There's not much reason to settle the moon and mars prior to the remote establishment of an independent food supply. Aggressive remote terraforming through domes, mirrors, foreign microorganisms, explosives, and robots should come first. Establishing automated synthetic systems on these rocks to mimic what nature provides for free on Earth is the hard problem to be solving. Without such systems already place, wages will be extremely low and no one will want to live there.

A population decline is certainly not necessary to continue growing GDP/capita. What kind of neo-Malthusian nonsense is that? The economy is operating nowhere near peak performance... at least 1/3 of GDP is lost annually due to private capture of economic rent.

If the desire is to make online content more readable, it might be worth starting with the assumption that all content downloaded from the network will be read on a black-and-white ereader device with no persistent internet connection.

This assumption might require substantially reworking the hyperlink model of the internet, so that external references to content delivered by third-parties is sharply distinguished from internal references to other pages within the same work.

The U.S. lost Vietnam because rural farmers thought U.S. troops were working for land lords. Land lords would take control of rural areas and start charging farmers rent after it was cleared of Viet Cong. There is a similar problem in Afghanistan: the Afghan government raises most of its revenues from sales and excise taxes, and doesn't tax land owners on property privately seized from rural residents. Since it doesn't tax land and has not centrally issued titles to rural residents, it doesn't have good records on land ownership and can't prevent private land seizures effectively.

These are not inevitable problems. Our politicians just don't understand the difference between land and capital and have undermined U.S. efforts to promote land reform in Asia after it worked so well in Japan.

The ownership of land by value is more unequally distributed than the ownership of capital. Capital depreciates and needs to be regularly replaced each generation. The wealthy have never needed robots to live a life of plenty; they can extract as much labor power as they need through rent.

Compact urban settlement is a direct market substitute for the hydrocarbons which would otherwise be required to transport goods and people across longer distances.

The most important thing we can do to transition off of oil and fossil fuels is to maximize the intensity at which we utilize renewable resources which directly substitute for them.

We maximize the intensity at which urban land is utilized by phasing in a 100-1200% national or global land value tax over the next century on the appraised market price which all land is expected to sell for if cleared of improvements.

We can also promote the development of a national, inter-state, zero-emission, passenger & freight rapid-transit market several times faster than automobile highways by allowing private rail and hyper-loop operators to deduct qualified ticket sales from their land value tax liabilities.

The shift of the state and local tax burden off of real estate held by wealthy savers and on to sales and purchases of household expenditures, the shift of the federal tax burden off of property income (most 'capital' gains are land value gains) and on to payroll earned by younger workers.

All of these changes to the tax code have increased the rent which wealthy property owners can extract from younger workers without having to work themselves, at the cost of increasing the tax burden on younger working families, so that they cannot afford to have as many children as early in life.

We should phase in a federal 400% annual land value tax on the appraised price which all land would sell for if clear of improvements over the next 80 years.

A 400% annual tax on the market value means the expect purchase price of an empty lot will approach 3 months worth of tax payments for holding it. A percentage of the gross revenues can be prebated to citizen residents at the beginning of each year to afford taxes due at the end of the year. A large deduction can be granted for land and real estate property tax payments made to state and local governments.

The additional revenues gained from the tax can be used to abolish sales and payroll taxes which fall more heavily on younger working families so it is more affordable for future generations to have a larger number of children earlier in life.

If the thesis of Progress & Poverty is correct, then the cyclic nature of civilization is due primarily to the tendency of the labor cost of acquiring unimproved land for productive workers to increase faster than the rate at which wages can be accumulated to acquire it. If this is the case, then the decline of our present phase of civilization may have begun in the 1930s, when state governments in the United States begun replacing property taxes with sales taxes, as the share of total government revenues raised from property taxes has now fallen from 40-50% to less than 10%, and the share is even lower in other countries.

However while the Roman Republic relied primarily a 1-3% annual property tax on wealth to fund its early expansion from 509BC, it had abandoned public assessed domestic property taxes by 167BC at the latest, yet the the Roman Empire reached its height in 117AD. So the point in time at which a country eliminates domestic property taxes on landed wealth in order to maximize the private capture of rent for its political class is unlikely to represent the peak or maximum of the civilization, but rather an initial inflection point, in which case a peak of our current phase of civilization during the 1960s may have been possible, with the inflection point occurring earlier.

Tax policy has a huge impact on growth. However what matters much more than quantity of tax is the quality of tax.

Money is public credit and varies in quality depending upon what it is secured by. Broad-based sales and payroll taxes are the worst possible quality of tax which undermine their own base. Sales taxes destroy commerce and payroll taxes which shift the tax burden from old savers onto young workers make it harder for families to afford having kids as early.

Land value and property income taxes are the best quality of tax, because the state simply confiscates a portion of the free lunch which would otherwise be privately captured by landlords, without discouraging any productive economic activity.

Louisiana is an example of a state with very poor tax "quality": low property tax, large property tax exemptions for businesses, and high sales taxes. It has negative real GDP growth per capita.

The public is frequently malinformed by experts as to what taxes are the best quality, because many tax 'reform' advocacy organizations actually advocate that the governments use the worst possible quality tax because they hypothesize that it will cause voters to advocate for lower government spending.

Paying for Social Security using payroll taxes as we are currently doing seems like national suicidal, because younger families gain a greater share of their total income from working, rather than from holding land and investments.

Payroll taxes increase the effective tax burden on younger working families in their prime reproductive years, which means they can no longer afford to have the same number of kids, or to have kids as early. When younger workers are taxed, the less affordable it is to create new generations of younger workers, and fertility rates decrease.

The best thing the United States could do to address this would be to eliminate FICA \ self-employment taxes and fund social security out of a general income tax which taxed capital gains and dividends at the same rate as labor income. An even better solution would be fund it via a national real-estate property tax or national land value tax, and not to raise it from taxes on earnings at all, as Thomas Paine originally proposed in Agrarian Justice.